I decided to see if I could find a better bittorrent client than azureus which has been my bittorrent client of choice for years. Most bittorrent clients are pretty basic but deluge-torrent seemed to be aware of the strengths of azureus with its numerous plugins and emulated that. The package comes bundled with numerous plugins, many of which had similar functionality to [[azureus] plugins. It also seemed that deluge-torrent despite being new to Ubuntu (in 7.10) was fairly mature and since it was written in Python instead of Java I hoped it would be much less resource intensive.

Upon upgrading my laptop I decided to take advantage to the availability of the powertop application to try and reduce the power consumption of the laptop. I was able to reduce idle power consumption from about 20 watts down to about 14 watts which is a pretty significant improvement. I’ve documented the various changes I made to achieve those results.

I have very little doubt that my biggest disappointment and frustration with Ubuntu 7.10 is that pidgin (which was gaim in prior releases) still does not have SILC support built in. I think the frustration is just that th fix is so trivial and has been reported for so long. Still I suppose it’s not considered a big enough priority to warrant anyone’s time though, as noted below, it seems like the Ubuntu folks deliberately pulled functional SILC support from the Debian pidgin package. However, since this release will not ship with functional SILC support in pidgin here is the procedure I used to get SILC working in pidgin under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).

Following the upgrade of my desktop computer from Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) I did some work to clean up the system and configure it properly. My efforts focused on configuration files which were overwritten during the upgrade. I also wanted to reduce the large amount of disk space consumed in the upgrade by removing old and unnecessary packages and package archives. I concluded with improving the multimedia capabilities (playing dvd’s and video files) of the system.

I figured I would try and beat the rush and upgrade my desktop computer to Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) tonight. Tomorrow and in the near future the servers hosting the Ubuntu package repositories are likely to be slow. I also feel that I needed to get some practice in tonight in order to assist people I know with the upgrade. In the past I have always performed version upgrades through the shell use the apt-get commands. I wanted to try in this release to see how the graphical upgrade utilities were working. As a user who is frequently trying new things and changing the system I wasn’t optimistic.